Wedding Readings From Shakespeare – Just For Thee

These old-school pieces of prose are perfect for declaring your undying love.

by Rebecca Hanley

He penned Romeo & Juliet, so the guy knows a thing or two about love. Why not consider including a reading from the master of prose himself in your wedding ceremony? Get thee to a comfy chair, and behold some of our favourite Shakespearean gems:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (Sonnet 116)

My bounty is as boundless as the sea, My love as deep; the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite. (Romeo and Juliet, 2.2.139-41)

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer’s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm’d; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee. (Sonnet 18)

One half of me is yours, the other half yours Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours, And so all yours. (The Merchant of Venice, 3.2.17-9)

I love thee so, that, maugre all thy pride, Nor wit nor reason can my passion hide. Do not extort thy reasons from this clause, For that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause But rather reason thus with reason fetter, Love sought is good, but given unsought better. (Twelfth Night, 3.1.151-6)

He is the half part of a blessed man, Left to be finished by such as she; And she a fair divided excellence, Whose fulness of perfection lies in him. (King John, 2.1.447)